Drupal 8

We started regular Drupal usability meetings twice a week almost a year ago in March 2016. That is a long time and we succeeded in supporting many key initiatives in this time, including reviews on new media handling and library functionality, feedback on workflow user experience, outside-in editing and place block functionality. We helped set scope for the changes required to inline form errors on its way to stability. Those are all supporting existing teams working on their respective features where user interfaces are involved.

However, we also started to look at some Drupal components and whether we can gradually improve them. One of the biggest tasks we took on was redesigning the status page, where Drupal's system information is presented and errors and warnings are printed for site owners to resolve. While that looks like a huge monster issue, Roy Scholten in fact posted a breakdown of how the process itself went. If we were to start a fresh issue (which we should have), the process would be much easier to follow and would be more visible. The result is quite remarkable:

Starting with Drupal 8, we decided to make more rapid innovation possible by releasing minor versions every 6 months that may come with new features and backwards compatible changes. Now that we released Drupal 8.1.0 and almost 8.2.0 as well, how did we do? Also what else is possible and what is blocking us to make those moves? What do all the changes mean for how might Drupal 9 unfold?

Dries Buytaert posted last Wednesday The transformation of Drupal 8 for continuous innovation and on the same day I presented Checking on Drupal 8's rapid innovation promises at DrupalCon Dublin. Here is a video recording of my session, which should be good for those looking to get to know Drupal's release process and schedule, as well as how we made it possible to experiment within Drupal core directly with Drupal 8. While I did hope for more discussion on the possibilities within Drupal 8 with the participants, somehow the discussion pretty much ended up focusing on Drupal 9, when it should be released and how much change should it come with.

Drupal 8 introduced initiatives to the core development process with the intention that even core development became too big to follow, understand or really get involved with in general. However because there are key areas that people want to work in, it makes sense to set up focused groups to organize work in those areas and support each other in those smaller groups. So initiatives like Configuration Management, Views in Core, Web Services, Multilingual, etc. were set up and mostly worked well, not in small part because it is easier to devote yourself to improving web services capabilities or multilingual support as opposed to "make Drupal better". Too abstract goals are harder to sign up for, a team with a thousand people is harder to feel a member of.

Given the success of this approach, even after the release of Drupal 8.0.0, we continued using this model and there are now several groups of people working on making things happen in Drupal 8.x. Ongoing initiatives include API-first, Media, Migrate, Content Workflows and so on. Several of these are primarily working on fixing bugs and plugging holes. A significant part of Migrate and API-first work to date was about fixing bugs and implementing originally intended functionality for example.

If you have an issue involving usability, a bug with a Drupal web service API, a missing migration feature and so on, your best choice is to bring it to the teams already focused on the topics. The number and diverse areas of teams already in place gives you a very good chance that whatever you are intending to work on is somehow related to one or more of them. And since no issue will get done by one person (you need a reviewer and a committer at minimum), your only way to get something resolved is to seek interested parties as soon as possible. Does it sound like you are demanding time from these folks unfairly? I don't think so. As long as you are genuinely interested to solve the problem at hand, you are in fact contributing to the team which is for the benefit of everyone. And who knows, maybe you quickly become an integral team member as well.

Join the https://localize.drupal.org/ team you want to contribute translations to (if not already). For testing, you can use the test language. Or better: just test with good translation suggestions so your reviewers will be happy.

The module comes with contribution enabled by default, but you need to set your API key so localize.drupal.org can identify you. Edit your user account on your site and enter the API key there. (Follow the instructions on the API key field on your user account edit screen).

If you want to grant other people to contribute, grant them the Contribute translations to localization server permission to contribute and tell them to enter their respective API keys on their user profiles.

Now when you go to the built-in software translation UI it will tell you that all things changed will also be submitted to localize.drupal.org and the submit button will reflect that too, to make it super-clear. If you did not set your API key yet, it will tell you to do that instead.

Once submitting the translation changes, it will let you know how many strings were successfully submitted and any errors encountered as well. All messages are also logged for later review.

The resulting effect of submitting changes locally are visible remotely by the community as well, yay!

In the previous tidbits we covered each language and translation capability one by one. The community translates the software interface on http://localize.drupal.org/ which you can customize with Interface translation. You can translate your local configuration and content with the Configuration translation and Content translation modules respectively. However, actual real life use cases are never clear cut like that. Content shows up with some shipped interface elements, local configuration and content. Menus contain elements from code, content and configuration. It is good to know how these pieces relate so you can translate every piece and know the right place to do it.